In my opinion there are shortcuts taken in every single industry – sometimes the effect of these shortcuts aren’t even evident, sometimes they are minute, or something they are glaringly obvious – but it always happen.
When I’m working on a project I try to stick by my principles, which are:
- doing the simplest thing possible to be effective and accomplish the task
- making sure that for the clients and users the end product looks professional
When it comes to looking professional I feel that taking shortcuts can hinder this best effort at times – especially when it comes to things like user experience. Just imagine, for example, if you had picked up a brand new car from Ford, and they hand you the keys that say ‘Honda’? Sure, they key might work, but it just doesn’t seem right, does it?
I get the same feeling when I visit websites which send me off to third party domains for certain things (OK, mainly payment, but sometimes this is justified) or they use a shared SSL certificate. Some people may consider this to be relatively trivial, but lets break it down…
Take, for example, the shared SSL thing – so your visiting an online store, and you want to purchase something… Normally you’d be sent to https://www.thestoresname.com and perform your transaction and all is well – but in a shared SSL situation you would be redirected to something else, say https://www.somethirdpartysite.com/sites/www.thestorename.com/… do we see the problem here?
Friends, family, random people in the street who I have asked about this said that they would more then likely leave the site rather then complete a transaction – the website might be 100% legitimate and offer the best products and the best prices etc, but that one simple thing is enough to be off putting.
The solution? Hand over some money. Lets face it – an SSL certificate isn’t that expensive – perhaps a few dollars per month for the dedicated IP, and you can pick up a basic certificate for around $50. The total cost of this? Per month? $7.50, including the time it took to set everything up. Possible savings? Consider how much you would loose if a potential say disappeared 10% of the time?
All in all, its a pretty simple decision, its not complicated to fix, and if you really want you can pay someone else to do it. Being and looking professional shouldn’t be an after thought, it should be part of the plan.
